Not About The Armour: The Seductive Nostalgia of Born Again

This article contains spoilers for Daredevil Born Again’s season one finale.

Rebooting Netlfix’s Daredevil forces an obvious question to be answered immediately: which Daredevil do you attempt to reboot, and how?

Author D.C. McNeill recently completed a three year study of Netflix’s Daredevil and Daredevil Born Again for ZeroIndent. Even the most ideal re-imagining of Charlie Cox’s violent drama was going to be different from the original, but a rash of outbursts online claiming Born Again a disastrous waste prompted us to ask: what is it about Born Again that didn’t quite work, and just what part of the Netflix story do you attempt to revive?

Across the original story’s three seasons, and the nascent interstitial arc of The Defenders, Marvel produced three “superhero” shows that occupied their own distinct and firm sub-genres within Netflix's Daredevil. The first season of Daredevil is a crime thriller. Matt Murdock and his colleagues in Foggy Nelson and Karen Page attempt to undo Wilson Fisk’s criminal empire, both in the court room and in the back alleys of Hell’s Kitchen. Murdock is a blind vigilante, the man in black, trained by his mysterious mentor Stick for some great war that sits slightly off screen. The scrappy, well-meaning trio of protagonists work toward this common goal, lying to each other, betraying each other, but ultimately they all remain on team good, picking off each boss in Fisk’s organisation. The season concludes with Matt’s identity as a vigilante driving a wedge between him and his best friend Foggy, and Matt confronting Wilson Fisk in a final melee, preventing Fisk from escaping the charges that Foggy and Matt have brought against Fisk.

The story, however, is fashioned into a religious epic, asking how much of your soul you’ll give over to do what you perceive is the right thing. Matt is an old school catholic, and the first season foregrounds the question of whether the violence he inflicts on criminals is to protect the city or for his own carnal pleasure. You could ostensibly set this first season in a heightened version of New York without any of the Marvel apparatus and it would work as a crime thriller cribbing off of Batman and Bradbury in equal measure. Probably more the latter than the former.

Season two is the most tonally divided. The first four episodes are a straight up Michael Mann neo-noir as Frank Castle rampages across the city shooting organised criminals into piles of bloody viscera. Daredevil eventually catches up with Frank, and Frank just… gives up. He’s too tired to keep going.

Frank’s story becomes a law procedural that acts as the story’s B plot, while the A plot sees the return of Matt Murdock’s ex-girlfriend, Elektra Nachios. She is here to stop The Hand, an ancient organisation taking over Hell’s Kitchen for their own nefarious, supernatural ends. The second half of the story blooms into a fantasy kung fu superhero epic, the bombast of ninjas flipping across the screen and our heroes promising to live somewhere perfect before walking into certain death is the exact kind of melodrama you want.

The story performs a tonal magic trick as Matt’s subjectivity is clouded by his love for Elektra we drift further and further from Foggy and Karen, and by extension, the B plot. This allows the law procedural with Frank to evolve to a natural, interrelated conclusion. Season two slides into a set up for The Defenders, a low budget street-level superhero team-up story. But, to be clear, if one were to remake Daredevil based on season two, this would be a sizable challenge: marrying the genre tones of fantasy superheroes and the gritty neo-noir is an impressive unicorn, resting on the strength of the writing and acting that, occasionally, feels like it might be doing too much.

The Defenders is… not great and largely not worth discussing here. The third season of Daredevil is the most impressive: a straight espionage thriller. A much reduced Matt Murdock attempts to discard his humanity to embrace his vigilante persona, all with one goal: to kill Wilson Fisk. Yet Fisk takes on Benjamin Pointdexter, a psychopathic FBI agent, and crafts him into a Daredevil impersonator. Dex wears the red armour as he murders and rampages across the city, slaying Fisk’s enemies while robbing Matt of the Daredevil identity.

We find a new protagonist in Ray Nadeem, a low-level FBI agent caught in the pincer trap of capitalism’s worst instincts, and just so happens to be chosen by Fisk as his point man for a truly cursed relationship as both jailer and confidential informant respectively. Ray finds himself blackmailed by Fisk’s criminal empire. Only for the curtains of reality to part when Ray learns that half of the FBI is on the take from Fisk: he has dirt on all of them. Fisk controls the FBI. Fisk controls the police. Fisk controls the city. And what Fisk cannot control, he points Dex toward like a gun and pulls the trigger.

The third season is much closer to Enemy of the State than a Bond flick, and ultimately Matt does beat Fisk. Ray’s death bed confession is enough to rip Fisk’s empire apart, while Matt blackmail’s Fisk to keep his friends safe. The conclusion is truly climatic, as Matt barely avoids damning himself to save the city.

I submit then that Netflix’s Daredevil is not a straight forward vehicle to reboot or continue, nor is living up to the show’s legacy easy. And so despite a long and troubled production, in Daredevil Born Again Dario Scardapane opted to write a show, ostensibly, about legacy, power, and whether Matt and Fisk can change their true nature - and then, by the time the season concludes, about non-state actors and American authoritarianism (how very timely).

At least for the first three episodes, Daredevil Born Again feels like a story setting out to prove it can do the work and fires off a series of questions in short order. First, does the story understand what made the original series work? Seems like it, we start with the “old world” where everything is good, Foggy is slain, and then we jump forward to a present day Matt dealing with Fisk’s return. Second, which season will the story use as a foundation? The third season, for sure, this is a button down crime thriller. No mystical ninjas, no immortal beings. And last question, can the action carry the momentum and weight needed? And aye, there’s the rub.

Born Again produces a unique tension between remixing the old series and committing to net:new ideas. Some additions are startling and brilliant - Kamar de los Reyes’ Hector Ayala, a.k.a. The White Tiger, is a keen and incisive story of racial profiling and class warfare. Matt’s new girlfriend, Heather Glenn, is a psychologist who finally has the labels for all of Matt’s many issues. Their relationship is at once caring and loving, and on a perpetual wire, as if at any moment they might spontaneously combust. Matt’s new law partner, McDuffie, is a wonderfully rendered character who should have double the screen time she ended up with. But for all these new additions, the remixing starts to take over. Fisk looms larger than life this season, the ultimate untouchable, corrupt mayor. Vincent D’Onofrio brings his trademark gravitas and physicality to this renewed Fisk. His slow, elegant monologues and warped truisms from his childhood are here. So too Matt Murdock’s trademark head tilt and grin as he lays on the charm or delivers a particularly clever joke.

All to say Born Again looks like a Daredevil show and sounds like a Daredevil show, but in the same way something can look expensive rather than looking good, the feeling of being a Daredevil show vacillates across the season.

By way of example, you could tell me the entirety of Hector Ayala’s trial was excised content from Netflix’s Daredevil season 1 and I’d believe you. But this Muse guy? I’m not sure about him as much. He feels like a killer from a Thomas Harris novel. This Daniel Blake dude we love to hate? Yeah, I guess he’s like a shit-heel version of Wesley but a bit more gormless. Fisk secretly building a city state to rule New York from a freeport beyond the law in cahoots with Vanessa? Big ticks all round on that one.

To that end, for a story about a deeply corrupt criminal posing as a successful business man, Born Again manages to get a few decent shots across the bow. The police commissioner all but spits in Fisk’s face multiple times. Fisk unleashes a secret police task force beyond the law to hunt down his political rivals in the name of rounding up immigrants vigilantes. He even does the stupid populist maneuver of bypassing sensible bureaucracy to fix a pot-hole. He looks effective, sure, but all of Fisk’s achievements are short-sighted, illegal or part of his end goal of becoming the de facto dictator of New York. These ideas are perhaps where Born Again refuses to focus on the politics directly. In Matt Murdock the narrative has the perfect vehicle to hold Fisk’s decisions under a microscope, but we, like Matt, know the law is insufficient, and so instead Matt dons the Daredevil armour once again, and this is where the focus lands.

The practical point of the Daredevil armour is that it provides Matt more autonomy to apply physical violence, more leeway to do what he cannot as a civilian lawyer. But the armour providing the application of violence is the central position Born Again takes. The notion that Matt is composed of violence, that he is foundationally a man who enjoys hurting people, is a theme that applies to Fisk as well. These two men have buried some essential part of themselves in an attempt to rise above, but this effort is self delusion. Toward the end of his relationship with Heather Matt admits that his life feels false, some fake thing that might disintegrate away like cheap cardboard at the first sign of rain and despite the fact his life does actually dissolve, I think we’re to take Matt’s suggestion that without Foggy and Karen, the only thing that feels real is Daredevil. Or perhaps the violence and works Matt does while in the armour is the only real thing.

Here I have to be honest: I don't think that Born Again knows what to do with this metaphorisation of the Daredevil persona. The story has access to all of the aesthetics of the original but something about how these pieces fit together fails to have a point of view about the Daredevil persona. Save that Matt will have to become a symbol of resistance. This is only exacerbated by the refusal to engage with Daredevil’s complicated legacy in the world. When Pointdexter donned the red armour and committed a series of heinous murders in season three, this surely changed something about Matt’s feelings toward Daredevil. Because the Netflix Daredevil has always seemed more comfortable as the man in black than he ever does the man in armour.

But Dex’s past impacts on the Daredevil persona, despite Dex’s position as an ongoing antagonist in Born Again (he bloody well shoots Matt Murdock for god’s sake), goes unaddressed. It is instead given that Matt needs to be Daredevil to resolve the grief he feels for Foggy’s death. And will do so by violent heroics. Only in the final episode when Karen Page returns to the story does Matt finally express his feelings about Daredevil and it’s the very last conversation of the season.

Matt and Karen kneel facing each other in the back room of Josey’s. Only meters from where their friend Foggy Nelson died. The city is now under Fisk’s occupation. And Matt explains what Daredevil means to him: “It wasn't the mask. It wasn't me needing to believe in it that saved me.

My mistake was thinking I was immune to the darkness. And I let it creep inside me. I let the dark power me. I threw Poindexter off that rooftop. Karen, I wanted to kill him. The truth is, ever since Foggy died…  I didn't know who I was anymore.” And so Matt’s admission is not really an admission at all, but a gesture toward a future position Daredevil will occupy: a vigilante capable of doing bad things but not losing himself.

The issue of Matt’s feelings on Daredevil go largely unresolved by the story. Matt decides to build an army to face Fisk, so he’s willing to lead, I guess? But not do too many bad things, I guess? Or do bad things but not feel guilty? I didn’t want a turn-key resolution for Matt, but for a season of television constantly showing Matt on the verge of breaking down because of his need to be Daredevil, I wanted more. I wanted the story to have a perspective on Daredevil.

Once the rush of Karen’s return wore off, I found the conclusion a little bit… vacant. Cool? Yes. Great set up for the future? You betcha. But did it really have anything to say about the story and the themes presented? Not really. And that quality, the ability to produce, address and discuss complicated and fraught topics is the defining quality of Netflix’s Daredevil. Lengthy, tense debates over morality. Parables and words of wisdom attempting to navigate impossible and dire circumstance.

So I find myself in the unique position of quite liking Daredevil Born Again but as a sugar-free, diet substitute for the real thing. And maybe that’s all Born Again needs to be: a Daredevil themed entertaining ride that doesn’t reach for the same drama, and is instead content to be a little more watchable, a little more streamlined, and in being so, a little less interesting.